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Wednesday, February 8, 2012

Who Wants War With Iran?

By Patrick J Buchanan

Appearing
alongside CIA Director David Petraeus before the Senate Select Committee on
Intelligence last week, James Clapper, the director of national intelligence,
said of Iran:

“We
don’t believe they’ve actually made the decision to go ahead with a nuclear
weapon.”

Before
the hearing, as James Fallows of The Atlantic reports, Clapper released his
“Worldwide Threat Assessment.” It read, “We do not know … if Iran will
eventually decide to build nuclear weapons.”

Clapper
thus reaffirmed the assessment of 16 U.S. intelligence agencies in 2007,
reportedly repeated in 2011, that the U.S. does not believe that Iran has
decided to become a nuclear weapons state.

In
December, when Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said that if Iran went all out,
it might be able to build a nuclear weapon in a year, Pentagon spokesman George
Little hastily clarified his comments:

“The
secretary was clear that we have no indication that the Iranians have made a
decision to develop a nuclear weapon.”

On
Jan. 8, Panetta himself told CBS:

“(Is
Iran) trying to develop a nuclear weapon? No. But we know that they’re trying
to develop a nuclear capability. And that’s what concerns us. And our redline
to Iran is: Do not develop a nuclear weapon.”

On
Super Bowl Sunday, President Barack Obama told NBC’s Matt Lauer that he hopes
to solve the Iranian problem “diplomatically.”

From
the above, we may conclude that the administration does not believe that Iran
has crossed any redline on the nuclear issue — and President Obama does not
want war with Iran.

From
their actions, it would appear not. If Iran wanted war with the United States,
any terror attack inside this country or on U.S. forces in Iraq or Afghanistan
could bring that about in an afternoon.

Expulsion
of the International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors from the Natanz enrichment
facility, covering up the IAEA cameras, breaking the seals on the low-enriched
uranium stockpiled there, or removing the LEU would be a fire bell for the
Pentagon.

But
the IAEA inspectors and LEU are still there.

When
the alleged plot by a used-car salesman in Texas to hire Mexican cartel
criminals to blow up a D.C. restaurant and kill the Saudi ambassador was
revealed, Iran denied it emphatically and demanded to interview the alleged
mastermind.

Moreover,
Tehran has yet to retaliate for the assassinations of five of its nuclear
scientists and four terror attacks by Jundallah in Sistan-Baluchistan and PJAK,
a Kurdish terrorist organization operating out of Iraqi Kurdistan. Iran has
alleged Western and Israeli involvement in these attacks.

Now
that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has denied any U.S. involvement, Mossad
is the prime suspect behind the killing of the nuclear scientists. And U.S.
writer Mark Perry, in Foreign Policy, alleges that Mossad agents posed as CIA
and used U.S. dollars in London to recruit Jundallah.

If
this is true, this would be a false flag operation to provoke Iran into lashing
out at America. Apparently, Iran did not take the bait.

Why
have the Iranians not followed through on their threat to close the Strait of
Hormuz and begun to dial it back?

War
with the United States would be a disaster. Though the Tehran regime might
survive — as Saddam Hussein’s survived Desert Storm — Iran’s navy, most of its
armor, anti-aircraft and anti-ship defenses, and its strategic missile force
would be destroyed, as would much of the country’s infrastructure. Iran would
be set back years.

Who,
then, wants war with Iran?

All
those who would like to see exactly that happen to Iran.

And
who are they? The Netanyahu government and its echo chamber in U.S. politics
and media, the neoconservatives, members of Congress, Newt Gingrich and Rick
Santorum.

And
as the Obama administration is the major force in U.S. politics opposed to war
with Iran, its defeat in November would increase, to near certitude, the
probability of a U.S. war with Iran in 2013.

Yet
if the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence community are correct — Iran does not
have a bomb and has not decided to build a bomb — why should we go to war with
Iran?

Answer:
Iran represents “an existential threat” to Israel.

But
Israel has 200 atomic bombs and three ways to deliver them, while Iran has
never built, tested or weaponized a nuclear device. Who is the existential
threat to whom here?

And
though a U.S. war on Iran would be calamitous for Iran, it would be no cakewalk
for Americans, who could become terrorist targets for years in the Gulf,
Afghanistan, Baghdad’s Green Zone, Lebanon and even here in the USA.

Year
2012 is thus shaping up as a war-or-peace election, with Republicans the war
party and Democrats the peace-and-diplomacy party.

And
as the months pass between now and November, this will become clear to the
nation.

-This Op/Ed was published in Eurasia Review on 08/02/2012
-Patrick J. Buchanan is an American conservative political commentator, author,
syndicated columnist, politician and broadcaster

About Me

I graduated from the French University in Beirut (St Joseph) specialising in Political and Economic Sciences. I started my working life in 1973 as a reporter and journalist for the pan-Arab magazine “Al-Hawadess” in Lebanon later becoming its Washington, D.C. correspondent. I subsequently moved to London in 1979 joining “Al-Majallah” magazine as its Deputy Managing Editor. In 1984 joined “Assayad” magazine in London initially as its Managing Editor and later as Editor-in-Chief. Following this, in 1990 I joined “Al-Wasat” magazine (part of the Dar-Al-Hayat Group) in London as a Managing Editor. In 2011 I became the Editor-In-Chief of Miraat el-Khaleej (Gulf Mirror). In July 2012 I became the Chairman of The Board of Asswak Al-Arab Publishing Ltd in UK and the Editor In Chief of its first Publication "Asswak Al-Arab" Magazine (Arab Markets Magazine) (www.asswak-alarab.com).

I have already authored five books. The first “The Tears of the Horizon” is a love story. The second “The Winter of Discontent in The Gulf” (1991) focuses on the first Gulf war sparked by Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. His third book is entitled “Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: From Balfour Promise to Bush Declaration: The Complications and the Road to a Lasting Peace” (March 2008). The fourth book is titled “How Iran Plans to Fight America and Dominate the Middle East” (October 2008) And the fifth and the most recent is titled "JIHAD'S NEW HEARTLANDS: Why The West Has Failed To Contain Islamic Fundamentalism" (May 2011).

Furthermore, I wrote the memoirs of national security advisor to US President Ronald Reagan, Mr Robert McFarlane, serializing them in “Al-Wasat” magazine over 14 episodes in 1992.

Over the years, I have interviewed and met several world leaders such as American President Bill Clinton, British Prime Minister Margaret Thacher, Late King Hassan II of Morocco, Late King Hussein of Jordan,Tunisian President Zein El-Abedine Bin Ali, Lybian Leader Moammar Al-Quadhafi,President Amine Gemayel of Lebanon,late Lebanese Prime Minister Rafic Hariri, Late Palestinian Chairman Yasser Arafat, Haitian President Jean Claude Duvalier, Late United Arab Emirates President Sheikh Zayed Bin Sultan Al Nahyan,Algerian President Shazli Bin Jdid, Jamaican Prime Minister Edward Siyagha and more...